macbeth

What are the three main concepts?

• Appearance vs reality

• Natural order

• Guilt

What is the overarching concept of the play?

Unchecked ambition

What are the three quotes for appearance vs reality?

• “Look like th’ innocent flower, but be the serpent under ‘t” (1:5)

• “False face must hide what the false heart doth know” (1:7)

• “There’s daggers in men’s smiles” (2:3)

What are the three quotes for natural order?

• “Fair is foul, and foul is fair. Hover through the fog and filthy air” (1:1)

• “Unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty” (1:5)

• “Some say the Earth was feverous and did shake” (2:3)

What are the three quotes for guilt?

• “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, … incarnadine making the green one red," (2:2)

• “I am in blood, stepped in so far that … returning were as tedious as go o’er” (3:4)

• “Will these hands ne’er be clean?” (5:1)

“Look like th’ innocent flower, but be the serpent under ‘t” (1:5)

• Metaphor (face compared to a book/flower)

• Connotation and juxtaposition (flower vs serpent)

• Biblical allusion (Satan tempting Eve/Garden of Eden)

Masks treason with sweetness; ambition overriding moral codes; Scotland’s moral transformation

“False face must hide what the false heart doth know” (1:7)

• Metaphor (mask of innocence vs internal corruption)

• Paradox (using ‘false’ for both face and heart)

Macbeth completely surrenders to evil; becomes a living contradiction; total loss of moral compass for ambition

“There’s daggers in men’s smiles” (2:3)

• Personification (daggers inside a smile)

• Synecdoche (smiles representing the whole killer/person)

• Juxtaposition (weapon vs pleasant expression)

Spoken by Donalbain; highlights extreme court paranoia; outward warmth masking lethal intent

“Fair is foul, and foul is fair. Hover through the fog and filthy air” (1:1)

• Paradox (reversal of good and evil)

• Trochaic tetrameter (incantation rhythm, alien tone)

• Alliteration - fricative ‘f’ sounds (mirrors harsh nature of the world)

• Pathetic fallacy (fog/filthy air mirroring moral pollution)

Establishes moral inversion from scene one; links to Lucifer’s fall, witches acting as agents of chaos

“Unsex me here, and fill me from the crown to the toe top-full of direst cruelty” (1:5)

• Characterisation (power hungry, ruthless)

• Metaphor (body as a vessel/container)

• Visual imagery (poured in cruelty)

Subversion of Jacobean gender norms and motherhood; rejecting feminine ‘weakness’; alignment with the supernatural; contrast with her later guilt driven breakdown

“Some say the Earth was feverous and did shake” (2:3)

• Visual imagery (sick, infected nature)

• Personification (Earth having a fever/shivering)

• Pathetic fallacy (weather acting as a microcosm of macrocosm chaos)

Spoken by Lennox; disruption of the Divine Right of Kings and Great Chain of Being; nature violently reacting to regicide

“Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, ... incarnadine making the green one red,” (2:2)

• Rhetorical question/hypophora (no doubt about the morality of Duncan’s murder)

• Blood imagery/blood motif (symbolises guilt)

• Allusion (Neptune/Christian water for baptism)

• Hyperbole (ocean turned red)

Immediate psychological breakdown; blood as an unerasable moral stain; irreversible magnitude of regicide compared to purity

“I am in blood, stepped in so far that … returning were as tedious as go o’er” (3:4)

• Extended metaphor (wading through a river of blood)

• Motif (blood shifting from guilt to tyranny)

• Parallelism (balanced contrast of moving back vs forward)

• Visceral imagery (makes guilt tangible)

Point of no return; violence becoming a habit or addiction; shift from agonising guilt to desensitised tyranny

“Will these hands ne’er be clean?” (5:1)

• Rhetorical question (inescapable torment)

• Synecdoche (hands representing Lady Macbeth’s whole soul)

• Motif (blood/sleep motif echoing act two)

• Prose (loss of high status, fractured sanity)

Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking breakdown; complete role reversal with Macbeth; physical water failing to cleanse psychological guilt